Japan, China and increasing 'congagement'

Japan, China and increasing 'congagement'

Gwynne Dyer, London

If I were a Chinese strategic analyst of a moderately paranoid
disposition -- and all strategic analysts are paranoid by nature
-- I would be twitching uncontrollably by now. Call it
professional deformation, if you like, but I would have the
overwhelming feeling that China is being surrounded and that its
enemies are arming against it. And I would take Japan's latest
move as the final proof of a vast conspiracy against my country.

On Nov. 30 Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's prime minister, declared
that Japan's "peace constitution" should be changed so that the
country can legally maintain armed forces and strengthen its
military capability. "Can we defend our country with an
organization that has no war capability? Common sense says it is
impossible," he said in a speech to fellow members of the Liberal
Democratic Party, which a week before had proposed a
constitutional reform that would regularize the position of the
Japanese armed forces, now coyly referred to as "Self-Defense
Forces," and give them an official role in assisting Japan's
allies.

For the past 58 years, Japan's foreign policy has been
constrained by the constitution drafted for it by the U.S.
occupation forces in 1947, in which it renounced the right to use
armed force in international disputes or even to maintain
military forces intended for war-fighting at all. Once the Cold
War got underway and the United States needed strong allies in
Asia, Washington repented of its earlier idealism and began
pressing Japan to re-arm, but several generations of Japanese
politicians successfully used article 9 of the constitution to
excuse their reluctance to build up their military forces to the
level that the U.S. wanted.

Over the years, Japan's "Self-Defense Forces" have gradually
grown to a strength of 250,000, almost half the ratio of military
personnel to total population that prevails in the United States.
They are well trained and equipped, too, but the constitutional
ban means that they lack key types of formations and equipment
that would let them wage large-scale war against serious
opponents beyond the home islands.

Koizumi wants to free Japan from those constraints, and he has
the full support and encouragement of the United States, but the
proposal rouses dormant anxieties in other Asians about Japan's
ultimate intentions. There is scarcely a country in East or
Southeast Asia that was not attacked, conquered or colonized by
Japan during the half-century from 1895 to 1945, when it was the
sole industrialized country in Asia.

Memories and suspicions about Japan run deep throughout the
region, but perhaps deepest of all in China, where the Japanese
invasion and occupation in 1937-1945 left very deep scars on the
Chinese psyche. They have been compounded by contemporary Japan's
striking reluctance to take full responsibility for its past
crimes -- and now it's breaking loose from the restraints of the
"peace constitution".

This comes on top of a sharp shift in Japanese foreign policy
towards Taiwan. Last February, Tokyo redefined the Taiwan Strait
as a "common strategic objective" of Japan and the United States
(implying that its forces would join the U.S. in resisting any
Chinese attack on Taiwan).

It is bad enough, in Beijing's view, that the United States
has promised military support to the rival Chinese government in
Taiwan ever since America's Nationalist proteges lost the civil
war and retreated to the island in 1949. It is close to
intolerable that Japan, the old enemy who invaded China in 1937-
1945 and has never properly atoned for it, should assert an equal
right to interfere militarily in China's internal affairs.

Then there is last July's ten-year military agreement between
the United States and India, which in Chinese eyes foreshadows a
full military alliance between the sole global superpower and
Asia's other emerging giant. There are the repeated visits of
senior American military officers to Hanoi, which seem to be
leading towards a similar U.S.-Vietnamese military agreement.
There are the new American military bases to the west of China in
Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It's hard for people
sitting in Beijing to avoid the conclusion that the U.S. is
seeking to encircle China with military alliances, in an echo of
its Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union.

The constant propaganda in the United States about a "Chinese
military build-up," complete with articles in serious magazines
like "Atlantic" about "How We Would Fight China," reinforces this
perception of an American threat. China's defense analysts know
that their budget is not growing significantly faster than the
country's economy as a whole, and that they are just modernizing
their decrepit military forces to the level already attained by
most of their neighbors.

So they ask themselves: What are the Americans and their Asian
allies up to? The answer, in Washington, is "congagement", a
policy of preparing to contain China militarily if it turns nasty
combined with an effort to engage China politically and
economically in the hope of encouraging democratic reforms. It
sounds pretty good in Washington -- a wise combination of stick
and carrot -- but in Beijing the perspective is different.

There, it feels a lot more like encirclement and threat. The
pressures to respond with a serious Chinese military build-up
must be mounting, and if that happens then America will reply by
redoubling its efforts to overawe and "contain" China and the
real arms race will begin. The holiday from history may be almost
over.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.